I really do note get why people are upset with them putting up wind turbines. I hear people complaining like cray. Is it that big of a deal??

There's more money in the government subsidies than off any electricity that they'll generate.

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That sound may be louder if they build it closer.

They are "bird grinders" or "bird blenders"

Rich people do not want to see them on their property or in their scenic views.  Kennedy prevented them from being built around his property because it would mess up his view.

Clearly, you don't live near one.

Maybe because they are utterly useless, hugely expensive and funded by our tax dollars?

ETA: Say you have always have a base need for 100 units (for simplicity not using regular measures) of power and usually spike up to 175 units during the heavy usage periods of the day. Say you build a windmill that can put out 175 units of power under the perfect wind conditions. Fantastic, you're covered... unless the wind isn't blowing, or it's blowing too hard or it's blowing too slowly or they are off for some other reason, welp now you're proper fucked unless you also built a traditional power plant that can also put out 175 units of power any time you need it and you keep that running 24/7 in order to make your power.

So what exactly did you accomplish by building a useless wind turbine other than adding a big, expensive pile of crap that doesn't actually replace any "dirty", reliable power generation capabilities and now that you now have to maintain forever.

The large ones are normally off on the hillsides and some NIMBY's  cry about the way they look.  They do take out a few birds now and then so the granola crowd gets upset when one of the prettier birds gets nailed.

Never was bothered by the site of them and seeing them across the flat lands of Texas is keeping people employed and a cleaner energy flowing.

Same thing with shallow water oil drilling in the gulf . We now have to drill deep which has more risk because views . . Also wind turbines will never pay for themselves for what little power they produce , plus they kill massive amounts of birds

Because all that money should be spent on private companies on private investments in the energy sector, not the government trying to play big business into something that will be left broken down after the 20 year subsidy runs out because it costs too much to repair based on the amount of electricity it outputs.

Green energy is stupid, and I wish I lived in a world where every dollar wasted on it by the government was applied to the development of Nuclear Energy.

They are ugly as fuck.

Most of the complaints I hear about are the way they look. Who cares. We have cell phone towers, power lines and other structures. Damn people...get over it already!

 
"Honey, can we build our new house here - the view is beautiful!!"


Sorry, not me!!!!

Or, if we didn't have that government waste, your personal tax liabilities could be less, and corporate tax rates could be lower which would invariably lead to more jobs created in the open market.

As the old adage about communism goes, "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work".

My solution is to get Purina to build a dog food factory next to the wind farm to recycle the bird strikes.

My friend has several on his property in west Texas. He was telling me when they break, it cost too much to fix so they just sit there for years unused because the price to fix/replace is not worth the return they will see.

They do make a fun sound when you hit one with a .22 form about 500 yards!

I guess they will be profitable if they are destroyed in a storm and the insurance pays off

Exactly.

Free-market wind turbines I would have zero problem with.

Flicker vertigo...


Aviator

Fixed it

For every windmill put into service, the utility company has to have "reserve energy" for when the wind does not blow, or the windmill goes out of service. That "reserve energy" is a power plant idling, waiting to shunt power to an area that depends on wind energy.

It's like having two cars, and one runs in the driveway all day waiting for the primary car to stop working.

I can't wait to see what the landscape will look like 50 years from now. All these burnt out generators sitting idle on rusting columns. Already you see many sitting idle while some others are operating.

They proposed to put then on barges that would have been so far out that you could not see them from land but Kennedy and Kerry secretly formed a group to oppose it so they wouldn't have to see windmills even from their yachts.



 

#1 reason lib's. hate them. They need to retreive the birds and make soup, stew etc.  It's a totally natural resource....

I never noticed the ones in Gloucester making noise. They are huge

Also look at how a coal power plant gets fine after fine for killing a single bird of prey, but wind farms can kill as many as they want and only have to report them, no fines whatsoever. I love seeing them all over Wyoming, knowing half of them don't even work because the turbines have gone out, but it's too expensive to fix, so they sit.

We had a 2 year study done by ISU at our site with 210 turbines and the results showed very few bird or bat strikes. I've seen more dead coons from chewing cooling fan wiring then dead birds!

Law of conservation of energy. Taking energy, via wind, from the system, and turning it into electricity, affects local climate. I'm not a climatologist, or a physicist, so I have no clue how large a difference it makes.

Make no mistake, if wind turbine tech ever does become market viable, the Marxists will come down on it like a ton of bricks.  They will not allow cheap abundant energy.

 
Can you imagine someone on drugs watching that?

Visual Pollution.  The sight of my countryside littered with all of the man-made windmills with their flashing red lights at night makes me sick.

Trying to set back and sip a cold one and watching nature flogged by the beating and whipping blades, with their whooshing sounds, not to mention the squeal and chatter of the worn and defective brake pads in not the way to spend your leisure time.

I'll take coal, gas or hydro power anytime.....

Monstrously expensive upfront and subsidies, retarded return on investment and ugly as shit.  At least paint the Damn things to blend in a bit.  They added a bunch in one of my favorite hunting units. They built a bunch of new roads then closed the roads to the public thus shrinking the area I can hunt in.

Large land usage, marginal energy returns = waste of time, space and money.

You really didn't need to tell us that... we had it pretty much figured out on our own.  

They are doing it in Northern Maine.

They first need to build large access roads to them on the tops of mountains. Then they have to "chop" off the top of the mountain for a flat surface for installation.

Then, they have to run power to them so they can keep spinning even when there is no wind. If they don't then the blades warp.

They look ugly in beautiful scenic areas and destroy the reasons whey people come up here --- to look at the beautiful scenery. .

Taxpayer black hole. Will not be a net benefit.

Screw that.

A small one, that is easy to maintain and reapir wouldn't be a big deal to me on my own property. However, this is just atrocious.















Everywhere you fucking look, in some places all you can see is windmills.  Bye bye scenery.

Even at their best, a large efficient turbine takes only about 2% of the energy of the wind that passes through its aperture.
About 4.7% of all the power used in USA naturally comes from wind power.
The time to recover the cost of putting up a wind-mill is just over 3 years, and for the rest of its lifetime (25-odd years), the power is essentially free.

So, I'll do my best to explain a few things from the standpoint of the power system.  I work for a major power company (part of the DoE)...transmission grid, not distribution grid; i.e. the big 500KV stuff, not your neighborhood power company.  A couple of things have already been mentioned, such as:

--Hideous eyesore, a blight on the terrain
--Government subsidies in the form of tax breaks; these wind farms are all owned by private companies, and they are NOT profitable without subsidies.  The power they produce costs significantly more per kWh than nearly any other source.  If they were forced to compete on the open market and the subsidies dried up, the companies would shut these places down overnight.  Poof.  Gone.
--Environmental impact.  Wind is "clean" energy; producing bazillion-foot-tall towers with spinning death blades on them is not.

But, it goes even deeper than this.

The government not only subsidizes these things, they REQUIRE transmission companies such as mine to buy their power.  What does that mean?  For you, the consumer, it means higher power rates, but not necessarily in the way you think.  Where you get jacked is in the spring, during runoff.  My company has to juggle running chainsaws every spring when the water starts to flow.  We are required, by law, to spill a limited amount of water over the dams.  If we spill too much, it over-nitrogenates the water, salmon fry get the bends, and die.  Yes, that's a thing.  But the water has to go somewhere, so we spin up the turbines in the dams and generate more power.  Usually the nuke plants and coal plants use this time of year to shut down for yearly maintenance, and everything is good to go.

Enter the wind farms.  The wind also tends to blow very strongly in the spring, so they all want to spin up every turbine and make as much profit as they can.  They are, after all, for-profit companies.  Since we are REQUIRED to preferentially purchase their power, we are left between a rock and a hard place.  Kill the salmon by spilling too much water so we can cut back on the generation at the dams, and face MASSIVE fines, or tell the wind farms to go fuck themselves and face MASSIVE fines.  

So what are we forced to do?  Save the fish, and pay the wind companies for all of the power they WOULD have generated, while the windmills sit idle.  You, as the consumer, eat that cost.  All because of directly conflicting federal laws.

But that isn't the end of it there, either.  Wind generation is spotty, at very best.  While sitting in one of our dispatching centers a few years ago for some training, I watched the wind generation levels over the course of a few days.

Day one:  A new record (at the time), something like 3.5 gigawatts.
Day two:  Less than a tenth of that, at 300 megawatts.
Day three:  Somewhere in between, around 1.6 gigawatts.

Since we are REQUIRED to buy everything they produce, we have to turn something on or off somewhere else every time their generation level changes.  For us, that's turbines at dams, which adds extra stress on them, and on the power system in general, as equipment is spun up or down on short notice, far more often than it used to be in the past.

A system on the verge of collapse, mind you, but that is an entirely different topic.  If you want to see the crumbling of American infrastructure happening in real time, look to the power industry.  Remember the TV show Revolution?  Forget the fucking sci-fi nanite bullshit reason.  When the power goes out for realsies, for a REALLY long time, it won't be anything more complex than the next Carrington event, a terrorist attack, or just the fact that we overstressed it to the breaking point because we were too lazy, shortsighted, and cheap to invest in beefing it up.  Plus NIMBY.  If you knew what I knew, you'd be BEGGING for a new 500kv transmission line to run through your backyard.

Stay on target...stay on target...  Sorry.  Wind blows.  Or sucks...or whatever.  You get the idea.  It's a shitty solution to an intractable problem.

Want a real solution?  Cover the SW with solar plants.  The kind that focus the sunlight on a giant tank of molten salts and use that energy to create steam to create power.  They take up a lot less space, aren't nearly as environmentally damaging, and generate consistent power 24/7, so are easier to integrate into the grid.

Hope this helps explain a bit about the system you are watching implode.  

Have you seen them? They're like thousands of red light flashing radio towers blighting up the landscape. if they tried to film Dancing With Wolves nowadays, they'd have to have a CGI budget bigger than the Star Wars reboots to erase all the stupid fucking windmills that you can see from 20+ miles away.

The farm off I 65 going to Chicago is downright fucking creepy at night.

We should have been generating at least 87% of our electricity from nuke plants for a couple of decades by now.

They are ugly as sin.
Would you want to look and hear them everyday?

Most are the epitome of Crony Capitalism and Corporate Welfare. Only a few installations can carry their own weight without help from your tax dollars..

This

Strobe effect from the blades turning in the sun.  Noise.  They turn the windmills off for certain periods of the year when the song birds migrate.  Home values have dropped. Some homes have not sold because of the windmills.  Lots and Lots of bats are killed.  The bats can avoid the blades but not the low pressure area the blades cause. Their lungs are sucked out.

Cleaner energy flowing. LOL.

You couldn't be more wrong about an ROI of 3 years. Do you work for Vesta?? I'm shocked to see your state, didn't Texas nearly blackout a few years ago solely due to wind?

They now have a bunch of them in Imperial Valley right off the I-8 as you drive down the grade from San Diego. I expect in a few years they will be so much junk for target shooters.

I don't mind how they look. I think they look cool, and I enjoy seeing stuff humans built as much as I enjoy nature. The problem with wind energy for the grid is that it is only done because government drops money into it and it isn't viable. Wind is great for pushing around sailboats and running a remote stock pump.

Or they let them rotate so they look like they are doing something . . .